Yesterday marked the two-week anniversary of my bitcoin faucet. So, I want to share some thoughts on what it's been like running it. Interestingly, the day I started my faucet happens to be the same day my keyboard was manufactured 26 years ago. :P

Before I get started, I'd like to take a moment to thank my loyal users for their continued enjoyment of the faucet, and for propelling my faucet to the top of the charts!

In this article,I'll be sharing some stats and thoughts looking back over the last two weeks.

Sometimes, the only thing better than getting something, is giving something away. So, since I've added a bitcoin donation link in the upper-right corner of the site, I decided to likewise add a bitcoin faucet here. Kinda like one of those take a penny, leave a penny trays, I suppose.

Continuing my messing around with Solaris 2.5.1, I began exploring the reasons behind the constant CPU usage from the VM. The rason, as you may already suspect, is that when Solaris idles, it never yields the CPU. I've written a driver to resolve this, which can be found on my Github. I've also made a binary package.

It's intriguing that if you have only one processor, then by default Solaris's idle thread simply calls an empty subroutine to idle the CPU. Perhaps it was expected that platform drivers should handle this in a platform-specific way. Who knows? Anyhow, here's the pertinent part of the idle thread...